14.

 Who alone can interpret Holy Scripture with authority?

            The Apostle Peter warns that “no prophecy of Scripture is of private interpretation” (2 Peter 1:20). Likewise, St. Cyprian of Carthage instructs that private interpretation of Scripture proves that a person or local congregation is not a part of the true Church of Christ. Thus, it is the Orthodox Church, which is the divine-human Body of Christ, that not only writes Holy Scripture, but interprets it as well. Moreover, only the Orthodox Church is able to interpret Holy Scripture with authority. An individual reader, however sincere he might be, falls into the danger of error if he trusts his own personal interpretations with regard to some of the Bible's many sayings that by themselves are far from clear. The reason for this danger is because, as St. Basil the Great explains, “Purity of heart is necessary in order to recognize that which is hidden in Holy Scripture.” The Russian Schema-abbot John of Valaam Monastery helps explain:

Holy Scripture can be understood rightly only by the pure in heart, for they comprehend the will and purpose of God in the Scripture, but for people with hearts unpurified of passions it is a stumbling block.... The Lord said: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 6:8). And the Holy Fathers purified their hearts of passions. They rightly know the will of God revealed in Holy Scripture, but those who have not purified their hearts of passions cannot rightly understand the Scripture, and such people stumble over it, turn away from the right path and go in different directions. One could say that they leave the big ship and sit down in a frail boat and want to sail across the sea of life, and they are perishing in the waves of vain sophistries [Fr. John, Christ in Our Midst: Letters from a Russian Monk, pp. 58-59].

Likewise commenting on the interpretation of Scripture, the nineteenth-century Russian bishop, St. Ignatii Brianchaninov (+1867), admonishes:

Do not dare to interpret the Gospel or other books of Holy Scripture by yourself. The holy prophets and Apostles pronounced Scripture. It was pronounced not arbitrarily but by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). How then is it not senseless to interpret it arbitrarily? The Holy Spirit, Who, through the prophets and Apostles pronounced the Word of God, interpreted it through the Holy Fathers. Both the Word of God and its interpretation are a gift of the Holy Spirit. This interpretation alone is accepted by the Orthodox Church! This interpretation alone is accepted by her true children!

Whoever explains the Gospel and all of Scripture arbitrarily, by this very act, rejects its interpretation by the Holy Fathers, by the Holy Spirit. Whoever rejects the interpretation of Scripture by the Holy Spirit, without any doubt, rejects also Holy Scripture itself.

And it happens that the Word of God, the Word of salvation, is for its audacious interpreters an order of death, a two-edged sword by which they stab themselves to eternal destruction (2 Peter 3:16, 2 Cor 2:15-16). By it did Arius, Nestorius, Eutychius and other heretics slay themselves eternally, having fallen into blasphemy by arbitrary and audacious interpretation of Scripture [On Reading the Gospel ; emphasis added].

The same bishop adds:

The writings of the Holy Fathers are all composed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.... Do not consider it sufficient for yourself to read the Gospel alone, without the reading of the Holy Fathers! Many people... who have senselessly and presumptuously rejected the Holy Fathers, who have come without any intermediary, with a blind audacity, with an impure mind and heart to the Gospel, have fallen into fatal delusion. The Gospel has rejected them: it grants access to itself only to the humble.... From the reading of the Fathers' writings we learn the true understanding of Holy Scripture [Ibid].

The depths of the words of the Holy Spirit, that is, Holy Scripture, contain within them unanswerable passages, or as St. Gregory of Nyssa puts it, “strong bones.” Those depths may be understood only by those who have received the grace of the Holy Spirit. These individuals are the holy ascetics, whose understanding has been opened by God “that they might understand the Scriptures” (Lk 24:45). On the other hand, “The carnal man cannot comprehend it” (1 Cor 2:14). Since most people fall into this second category, the Church comes to our aid by giving us the spiritual explanation of Scriptures.

            The Apostles received the gift of understanding the Scriptures, especially after the Holy Spirit descended upon them in the form of tongues of fire. And every faithful servant of God, every person who makes himself worthy of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, receives this same gift, according to his spiritual stature. To the degree that a person cleanses himself from the passions, to the degree that he turns aside from his self-will and submits himself to God's will by forcing himself to fulfill God's commandments, to the same degree does he make himself worthy to receive God's gifts. Among these gifts is the understanding of the spiritual meaning of Scriptures.

            The Holy Fathers took the narrow path of salvation. They purified their hearts and souls of earthly attachments and human passions, they cleansed themselves by great ascetic deeds and unceasing prayer, they fulfilled the commandments, and they obeyed the divine injunction: “Be ye holy, as I am holy.” Through such a life, they received God's mercy, and they received the gift of the spiritual explanation of the Scriptures. Although the Holy Spirit did not descend visibly on them in the form of tongues of fire, they still received these gifts. Many Holy Fathers and ascetics of the Church have written commentaries on various books of the Scriptures, and these commentaries entered the Church's treasury of spiritual wisdom. To this day, all the Church's faithful members nourish themselves on these writings.

            Also commenting on the Church's interpretation of Scriptures, a Russian monk explains that:

Anyone who has ever read the works of the Holy Fathers has been impressed by their astonishing unity of thought. Living in different countries, in different periods of time, the Holy Fathers had the same outlook, the same perspective. Clearly, it is one and the same Spirit that acted and spoke through them all. Whosoever desires to comprehend the wisdom of the Holy Scriptures would do well if he does not trust his own powers but, “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor 10:5), would humbly accept the wisdom from the Church's treasury. The mind of the Church is the mind of Christ. “We have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16). What can be more beneficial for us? To receive from the Church the true understanding of things, or to proudly remain in our delusions? For this reason all true servants of Christ prefer to accept the wisdom of the Church and to shun their own as useless. Only under this condition can we fulfill the commandment of the Apostle Paul concerning likemindedness among Christians: “I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you: but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment” (1 Cor 1:10); “fulfill ye my joy, that ye be likeminded” (Phil 2:2). And in many other places the holy Apostle speaks of this same likemindedness. From this it is clear what great importance he placed on this subject. And this is understandable: only given such likemindedness can there be preserved “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3). Only given this is true love possible among Christians. If there is no likemindedness, there will be only quarrels, disagreements and divisions. Writing to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul says that while he was there among them, they looked at things through his eyes (Gal 4:15). We too should look at things with the eyes of the Church. If we look with the eyes of our own unenlightened mind, each of us will see and understand in our own way. And the result will be — division.

To many it seems an inconceivable constraint for the mind to renounce its own judgments and submit itself to the judgments of the Church. But this is only an apparent constraint. St. Paul writes to the Corinthians: “Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own bowels” (2 Cor 6:12). So it is with us: it is not constraining for us in the Church, but only seemingly, since we have become accustomed to the evil and falsehood of this world and do not want to renounce them. We must convince ourselves that in accepting the mind of the Church we accept truth and in this way we draw closer to Christ, Who is the Truth (Jn 14:16). These judgments of the Church concerning various matters, including commentary on Scripture, consisting chiefly of the works of the Holy Fathers ... belong to the sphere of Sacred Tradition, and all faithful members of the Church conform themselves to these judgments.

Clearly, in the area of Scripture commentary it is simply not possible to manage without Sacred Tradition. Otherwise each individual would have to interpret the entire body of Scripture from scratch. We see that every religious confession, every sect, has its traditional explanation of Scripture, or at least of certain parts, and one can say that these explanations are the tradition of that particular confession. The authors of these explanations are, for the most part, pastors and preachers. Is it not better to take the commentary of Holy Scripture from the ancient saints, who acquired the Holy Spirit and who have received testimony from above, than from people like ourselves? [Monk Anthony, “Sacred Tradition,” Orthodox America, vol. 11, no. 4, p. 10].

Fr. Gregory Williams can therefore conclude:

We must look to the Church if we are to have any correct understanding of the Scripture.... Whenever man tries to rely upon his own reason, rather than upon God's wisdom as imparted in the Holy Church, heresy is the certain outcome ... separation from the Truth.

The writers of Scripture received their knowledge from divine vision — theoria in Greek. The Holy Fathers who commented on Scriptures were also partakers of the same divine theoria. Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos explains that through the centuries, there have appeared many heretical teachings that have distorted God's revealed Truth, that is, various false teachers elevated their minds above the mind of God. The Fathers confronted these heresies, he states, by the power of the Holy Spirit, for they are the bearers of the pure Tradition of the Church. The metropolitan also notes that calling the Church Apostolic refers (among other things) to the fact that the Church rests on the foundation of the Holy Apostles and the Holy Fathers, who are the Apostles' successors in nature and essence.

            It is only our ignorance that allows us to consider ourselves more “enlightened” than the Holy Fathers. Even a cursory reading of their lives and the lives of the other saints will demonstrate that we are spiritually weak people, by comparison. Given the God-inspired teaching of the Holy Fathers, one can readily discern that the patristic mind represents no ordinary mind, but something enlightened from on high, an ineffably noble treasure. Recognizing that the Fathers have a spiritual wisdom that we lack, and also knowing the poverty and fallibility of our minds, we must realize that we are not free to interpret the divinely inspired text of Holy Scriptures as we please (something the heretics did). Instead, we must turn to the Fathers and Church Tradition to allow them to open our minds to accept God's revelation rather than our own ideas. We must interpret the Scriptures as the Holy Fathers teach, for the Fathers are the only sure interpreters of Scripture. By adhering to this practice, we are prevented from the mistake of interpreting the Bible according to our own mistaken understanding and opinion, and we are helped in partaking of the catholic consciousness of the Church. Through this practice, one is prevented from going out on a limb of one's own creation.

            The idea that Holy Scripture is not to be interpreted privately, but as a Church, was given its classical definition by St. Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, when all the West was still fully united to the Orthodox Church. This zealous Church Father of Western Orthodox Christianity gave the renowned Vincentian canon of universality, antiquity and consent — that is, that that doctrine is binding which is held “everywhere, always, and by all” (quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum). St. Vincent wrote:

Since the canon of Scripture is complete and more than sufficient in itself, why is it necessary to add to it the authority of ecclesiastical interpretation?... Holy Scripture, because of its depth, is not universally accepted in one and the same sense. The same text is interpreted differently by different people, so that one may almost gain the impression that it can yield as many different meanings as there are men.

... Thus it is because of the great many distortions caused by various errors, it is indeed necessary that the trend of the interpretations of the prophetic and Apostolic writings be directed in accordance with the rule of ecclesiastical and catholic meaning.

In the Catholic [i.e., Universal — see note below] Church itself, every care should be taken to hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. This is truly and properly catholic, as indicated by the force and etymology of the name itself, which comprises everything truly universal.

This general rule will truly be applied if we follow the principles of universality, antiquity and consent. We do so in regard to universality if we confess that faith alone to be true which the Church confesses all over the world. [We do so] in regard to antiquity if we in no way deviate from those interpretations which our ancestors and fathers have manifestly proclaimed as inviolable. [We do so] in regard to consent if, in this very antiquity, we adopt the definitions of all, or almost all, of the bishops [As quoted in Fr. John Whiteford, Sola Scriptura... p. 39].

(Here it should be noted that from antiquity, the Christian Church chose the word catholic to signify one of the principle attributes of the Church: its universality. In the ancient Symbols of Faith, whenever the word Church appears, it is unfailingly used with the adjective catholic. Likewise, the term is constantly to be found in the Acts of all the Ecumenical Councils, as well as in the writings of the Fathers. In all of these places, the word is never used in the sense of Roman Catholic, but in its original sense, which, as Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky explains, “signifies the highest degree of all-embracingness, all-inclusiveness, wholeness, fullness.” As a footnote in this professor's Orthodox Dogmatic Theology notes, the name of catholic was kept from early times in the Roman Catholic Church, but the teaching of the early Church has been preserved in the Orthodox Church, which even to this day can be and still is called catholic. Protopriest Victor Potapov further explains that from the ninth century, the Eastern and Western Churches have gone along very different paths. The appellations which they took speak of the aims pursued by them: the Eastern Church began calling itself Orthodox, underscoring thereby that its main aim is to preserve the Christian faith unharmed. At the same time, the Western Church began to call itself Catholic [“Universal”] emphasizing thereby that its main aim is the unification of the entire Christian world under the omnipotence of the pope).

            The Latino-Protestant tradition and its deviations from its former Orthodox heritage are not the main focus of this course. However, the Protestant deviation from the Orthodox understanding of the ecclesiastical interpretation of Scripture will be examined here since, carried to its final conclusion, it forms the basis of the tyrannical relativism of the modern ecumenical movement.

            After the Latin Church severed itself from Apostolic Christianity and from the authority of Sacred Apostolic Tradition in 1054, the West was free to pursue its search for a new religion. At that time, a new element began to enter into Western thought: a growing emphasis on man rather than God. This development was seen almost immediately after the Great Schism, and it continued unchecked throughout subsequent centuries. As a result, the Western Church continuously moved away from the teachings of early Christianity, away from the light of the Gospel, and into the darkness of humanism.

            Here it is necessary to pause on humanism, a doctrine that was born in the fourteenth-century Italian Renaissance with the rediscovery of the ancient classics. Humanism exalted the human intellect, fostered a critical spirit of inquiry, and beginning with man, and using man as the only integration point, it undertook to create a new philosophy of man. Humanism entails nothing less than Western man's dethroning God and placing man at the center of the universe in His stead. For this reason, humanism has been called the self-worship of man rather than God.

            The prevailing intellectual current of the Renaissance was humanism. During this period, a “synthesis” was made of Latin Christianity and pagan thought. As Archpriest Alexey Young writes concerning this period:

We see this [“union”] in the writing of Dante and in the artistic creations of Michelangelo — for example, his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. In art, these new concepts are particularly noticeable. For the first time, all artists began to make use of perspective — which is not wrong in and of itself, but which made it possible to place man in the center of space. It was a very optimistic, idealized concept of man. What man ever looked like Michael-angelo's David? This was not the Old Testament prophet and king; rather, it was a representation of the humanist ideal of man's “greatness.” Religious art was now couched in completely human terms, at times actually blasphemous. For example, Fouquet's... painting, popularly called The Red Virgin [was] the king's mistress.... What could be more insulting to pious feelings? While the Virgin had for centuries been highly regarded, now all holiness was removed and representations of her were stripped of any “religious” meaning. Here we see how individual things were being viewed as more and more independent and divorced from reality.

The Renaissance is full of examples of this new emphasis on man to the exclusion of God. Whereas in the Middle Ages, artists had remained largely anonymous, and gave glory to God for their achievements, the Renaissance man identified himself as creator: a wonderful aura began to surround men of artistic genius. In Cellini's boastful autobiography (1558), he suggests that ordinary morality does not apply to geniuses like himself, an idea which has received lasting credence among Western artists. What demonic pride! Even the genre of biography strengthened man's faith in himself.

Not everyone, however, saw life in such overtly pagan terms. Some realized that it was indeed just that, a pagan “cloud” which ultimately could never support a meaningful philosophy of life. In Leonardo da Vinci we discover that at the end of his life, at the very height of humanism, he began to see where humanism would end. Da Vinci realized that, starting with man, one would never arrive at any ultimate meaning, and once the meaning and purpose of existence had been lost, man was no more than a machine, a collection of molecules — which is precisely the conclusion of many thinkers today. It is no wonder that da Vinci, who lost all Christian hope, spent the last years of his life in a state of advanced depression.

But if men like da Vinci were finally able to see the logical conclusion of humanism, most others did not, and mankind was held fast in the grip of humanism. Even today we still hear echoes of it: “I can do whatever I will, just give me enough time.” This is fallen man speaking. And once man has placed himself at the center of the universe, independent of everything else, it was almost impossible to dislodge him; the most powerful patrons of art in Europe, the Renaissance popes, themselves fully supported this neo-paganism [The Great Divide: the West Severs Itself From Its Orthodox Roots: an Historical Overview, pp. 13-14].

During the ensuing period of the falsely-called Enlightenment, humanist thinkers perpetuated the Renaissance fascination with pagan ideas. Among those pagan ideas was that of rationalism — the assumption that by the use of intellect alone, man can ascertain truth and can derive universals from it. Thus, the Enlightenment concluded, man can reject the idea of revealed absolutes. (Rationalism, with its dependence on fallen human reason, is not to be confused with reason itself, which is a gift from God). The Enlightenment period was rooted in a total rejection of the Christian basis for life, and with its revival of destructive pagan influence, shock waves reverberated throughout Europe and affected everything, from art and science to educational theory. As the same Fr. Alexey observes, Europe, Western man, our world has never recovered; from this time forth we become a truly post-Christian “civilization.” In view of what has previously been explained about heresies, these historical developments show that the West has been led by the devil onto a dead-end street.

            In order to gain a more thorough understanding of how so tragic a development could come about in the West, once fully Orthodox Christian, it is necessary to look back to the thirteenth century, to the writings of a Dominican monk, Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas' works were condemned by popes and proclaimed heretical in 1277. It was not until years later that his teachings gained respect and that he came to be one of the most influential thinkers of the Middle Ages. Aquinas is considered a major theologian in the Roman Catholic Church, one whose works were selected by the Roman see as normative and worthy of merit. (In this reversal of position, one can see how teachings can be false and heretical in the Latin Church at one time, only to become “true” at another time). Aquinas' teachings will be examined here as they set the direction for the future development of Western theology and were the stimulus to the rise of humanism in the West.

            Aquinas is famous for his Summa Theologica, a massive set of volumes of questions and answers that, as Hieromonk Seraphim Rose explains, resemble the dossier of some legal case, and one that is filled with syllogistic reasoning (“if... therefore... and it follows... consequently...”). In describing the fall of man in this work, Aquinas proposed that while the will of man was corrupted, his intellect was not corrupted. This idea was completely revolutionary, and it was totally foreign to Apostolic Christianity. What is meant was that man no longer needed God's revelation to find the truth, but that he could rely on his own human reason instead. Intellectual reasoning was elevated to such a lofty height in Aquinas' teaching that all Westerners were seduced into thinking that they can supplant God's revelation with human reasoning. Aquinas inadvertently opened the door to the error of the Greek philosopher Protagoras (sixth century BC), who said that “man is the measure of all things.”

            Aquinas' teaching was a departure from the Orthodox patristic approach, which bases the truths of the Christian faith upon the foundation of divine revelation — and not on rational, abstract deductions. Even as far back as the fourth century, St. Gregory of Nyssa stated that “men, having left off delighting themselves in the Lord (Psalm 36:4) and rejoicing in the peace of the Church, undertake refined researches regarding some kind of essences and measure magnitudes.” Such a pursuit is foreign to the aim of true theology, which has the very practical task of Christian perfection.

            Divine revelation and the patristic witness of revelation cannot be neglected, for the Holy Fathers are golden links in the chain of Truth forged by the Holy Spirit throughout the centuries in Christ's Church. Not everyone has the intellectual ability or grace necessary to expound Scripture correctly. This fact is noted by the Apostle Peter, who states that “there are some things in [Paul's epistles] hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16). Moreover, when Church history is examined, it is apparent that all the heretics began with human conjecture and anthropocentric views and always tried to investigate and analyze the Truth of the Church through human reasoning. On the other hand, as Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos explains, the Holy Fathers were based on the method of Orthodox devotion, which is purity of heart and illumination of the nous (the eye of the soul). After these two stages of their spiritual life, the metropolitan continues, they were able to attain knowledge of God and to theologize with divine inspiration (cf. The Person in the Orthodox Tradition, p. 40). As Elder Cleopa of Romania goes on to add: “The... prophets and Apostles, as well as the Holy Fathers of the Church, while by the purity of their lives attaining to the simplicity and innocence of infants, at the same time also, on account of their wisdom, became as ‘perfect spiritual men’  (The Truth of Our Faith, p. 160). Hieromonk Seraphim Rose comments further on the Holy Fathers and explains that

In only one place is there to be found the fount of true teaching, coming from God, Himself, not diminished over the centuries but ever fresh, being one and the same in all those who truly teach it, leading those who follow it to eternal salvation. This place is the Orthodox Church of Christ, and the true teachers of the divine doctrine that issues from this fount are the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church [“The Holy Fathers of Orthodox Spirituality,” Orthodox Word, vol. 10, no. 5, p. 188].

As Dr. Ivan Andreyev also notes:

The divinely revealed teaching of God and man, preserved throughout the centuries and enriched in the saving enclosure of the Orthodox Church, is a limitless ocean of wisdom and should be approached with fear and trembling so as not to soil any aspect of it through out sinfulness and pride. It can in no way be improved upon by the daring hand of our intellectual worldliness [Orthodox Apologetic Theology].

However, intellectual worldliness came to prevail in the West through Scholasticism, a system of academic reasoning that integrated rational philosophy with theology and lent itself to speculation. The Scholastics' unnatural synthesis of theology and philosophy was based on the abstract syllogistic method of inquiry used by Aristotle. It is

 ... a form of reasoning in which a conclusion is drawn from two given or assumed propositions (premises): a common or middle term is present in the two premises but not in the conclusion, which may be invalid (e.g., all trains are long; some busses are long; therefore some busses are trains: the common theme is long [The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, ninth ed].

Scholasticism thus became a sterile framework more suited to exercising the intellect than to attaining a knowledge of the Creator and His creation, and it concerned itself with how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. However, through this new methodology, the Scholastics created a system by which they falsely imagined they could explore and investigate the mysteries of the Christian faith. Western theology therefore began to lose its living relation to the truth of Christianity. In the West, theology was reduced to a system — a system intended to “improve” upon the theology of revelation. Moreover, this attempt of the human intellect to revise Christianity was at the root of the later errors of the West.

            Under the influence of Aquinas' teaching, Western philosophers increasingly began to think in an independent, autonomous manner and came to feel free to mix the divinely revealed truths of Christianity with the teachings of non-Christian philosophers. (It is for this reason that so many Catholics and Protestants today believe that Christian truth need no longer be tied to revelation, but can be mixed with the teachings of non-Christian religions and philosophies). Aquinas himself relied on Aristotle, a development that was to prove deadly for Western theology, and hence for modern Western man. As Archpriest Alexey Young writes:

It is important for us to understand Aristotle's ideas, which Aquinas transformed into the framework of post-schism Western thought, because Aristotelianism prepared the way for Renaissance humanism, which underlies the whole problem faced today by Western man. Essentially, Aristotle taught the importance of “particulars,” individual things over absolutes or “ideal” things. “Particulars” became so important that their true meaning — which is derived from their relation to an ethical hierarchy of absolutes — was eclipsed. This was a radical departure from the Platonic worldview which had given the pagan Greek world a philosophical preparation for Orthodoxy. If everything is judged from the relative basis of an individual's viewpoint, the finite individual ceases to have an ultimate value. And without some absolute meaning or purpose, outside of oneself, what use is there for living? What basis is there for morals? for values? for law? Thus, ever since Aquinas, Western man has been faced with a crucial dilemma: how to arrive at universal and absolute ideas that give meaning to the individual's existence — after the philosophical basis for an absolute has been destroyed [Op. cit. p. 10; emphasis added].

The West's progressive departure from the Orthodox worldview accelerated during the period of humanism. As Scholastic rationalism began to take possession of Western minds, all of its syllogisms — whether based on Scripture or based on Aristotle — came to be of equal value. As Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos writes in this regard:

The Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages considered Scholastic theology to be a development surpassing the theology of the Fathers, and this was the starting point of the teaching of the Franks that Scholastic theology is higher than the theology of the Holy Fathers. Therefore the Scholastics, who were concerned with reason, considered themselves superior to the Holy Fathers of the Church and also considered human knowledge, which is a product of reason, to be higher than [God's] revelation.... [The Mind of the Orthodox Church, p. 203].

Humanism did not go unchallenged. Prior to its spreading like tares in the Enlightenment period, a movement appeared in the late Middle Ages to counter its ruinous consequences. This movement grew out of the teachings of the fourteenth-century Oxford professor, John Wycliffe. In an attempt to restore belief in a universal absolute truth, Wycliffe went in the opposite direction and maintained that the Bible alone was the supreme authority. This idea was likewise radical and innovative, although it was not a surprising development, considering the confusion of those times in which people were struggling with the question of truth. Unfortunately, however, in his placing the Bible before the Church, Wycliffe did not have an understanding of the nature of Christ's Church, for Orthodox Christianity had long since disappeared from Western Europe. Its disappearance from England took place in the following way.

            During the eleventh century, the Germanic popes allied themselves with the all-powerful feudal, military aristocracies of Europe. Of these, the most powerful one was that of the Normans, and that alliance proved effective in helping Rome achieve its worldly aims. When England did not fall in line with Rome's schism in 1054, the pope financed Duke William of Normandy to invade and subdue England, As a consequence of the Norman conquest and its mass genocide of the English people in the Battle of Hastings (1066), England was brought under the control of the Germanic papacy. This was a papacy that had already cut itself off from the other four theologically more sophisticated Patriarchates of the Christian Commonwealth that had formed the Christian Church for one thousand years. This new papacy was isolated and estranged from the rest of the Christian world as the papacy had fallen into the temptation of becoming a worldly, temporal power, one with territorial aims. William the Conqueror's bringing England under the control of the Latin Church entailed nothing less than a change of religion for England — a change from the Orthodox Christianity of pre-conquest England, to the Roman Catholicism of its immediate post-conquest period. Thus, with the disappearance of the Holy Church from England in the eleventh century, it bears repeating, Wycliffe had no knowledge of it, and as a result, he ironically laid the groundwork for another humanist movement — the Protestant Reformation.

            Fr. Alexey Young notes that the Protestant Reformation had some good points: it believed that what the Bible says is true and that we can therefore know something about God. However, the humanist cult of the individual and its trust in human reason that the Protestant Reformers espoused, provided the grounds for a total subjectivism in religion — a development that spelled both the birth and death of Protestantism. In Protestantism, a new Christianity was created — one that rejects the safeguards of Apostolic Tradition, and one that bases itself upon private interpretation of Scripture. By introducing the subjective principle that each individual can interpret Scripture for himself, the stage was set for today's relativism in which anyone's opinion can become a standard of belief. Hierodeacon Gregory of Etna, a convert from Dutch Reformed Protestantism, explains that so it is that an Evangelical, for instance, blushing like a blue dog, can promote himself as a peer of “Paul.” Such an assertion ignores the fact that St. Paul was “a man in Christ... caught up to the third Heaven” (1 Cor 12:2) — and, Fr. Gregory adds, such is the disrespect that one frequently encounters among Protestants. He goes on to call it a spiritual egalitarian-ism that is the offspring of deep-rooted pride, the very antithesis of Christian virtue.

            Archimandrite Panteleimon of Jordanville also examines the Western approach, and he goes on to comment on where it is ultimately leading. He writes that:

[In the end times], the Gospel will be known to all, but some will not believe it; a greater number will hold heretical opinions, following not the God-given teaching, but building up their own religion, of their own fabrication, though based on the words of Scripture. These self-fabricated faiths will be numerous. Their roots are found in the papacy, and then continued by Luther and Calvin. These latter two, by setting as a principle their own personal understanding of faith from Scripture only, gave a strong impetus toward the invention of numerous confessions. Although there are many now, there will be many more. For every kingdom their own faith, and later for every province, and then for every city, and finally, perhaps, for every person, his own faith. Wherever people devise their religions for themselves, it cannot be otherwise. And all such faiths will continue to appropriate to themselves the name Christian [A Ray of Light: Instructions in Piety and the State of the World at the End of Time, p. 31; emphasis added].

Fr. Alexey Young makes some additional pertinent observations concerning the process in which the fallen human intellect came to be enthroned in the West. He notes that in Western Christianity, people think that one can come to a knowledge of the truth primarily by thinking through a given question or concept. There is no other requirement than that a person be reasonably intelligent and informed. Such an assumption has been the norm for so many centuries now in Western Christianity that no Western Christian sees anything wrong with it, despite the evident fact that individuals, even theologians, starting out with the same basic set of facts, can arrive at opposite conclusions. In Western Christianity, people come to substitute their own misunderstandings for divine understanding, that is, for the all-embracing reality of God's Truth. Because of that priority that Western Christians place on human reason, and their deification of it, heterodox Christianity came to be distorted in countless ways. In Western Christianity, man — not God — has been made the measure of all things.

            Fr. Alexey further explains that the Western approach is a deviation from that of the Holy Fathers and saints, who, rather than thinking things out, first struggle against their sins and passions and seek forgiveness. As Archpriest Nicholas Deputatov adds in this regard, “The mysteries of our faith are unknown and not understandable to those who are not repenting.” Moreover, as a Russian hierarch notes, the Eastern Orthodox teaching differs from that of the Western writers in that the Holy Fathers lead one to repentance and weeping over one's sins, whereas the Western writer leads one to spiritual enjoyment and self-satisfaction. It is therefore repentance — not academic education or human reason — that is the key to the knowledge of God, for it is only after repentance that God enlightens a person who seeks Him. Fr. Alexey observes that the Fathers did not despise human reason — they had a great respect for it, yet they also knew that God's ways often seem foolish to the wise of the world.

            Summing up the entire alteration of Christianity in the West, the eminent dogmatic theologian St. Justin (Popovich) of Chelije writes that “in Western Europe, Christianity has generally been transformed into humanism.” He then goes on to give the following compelling insight:

In both [Roman Catholicism] and Protestantism, man has replaced the God-Man as both the supreme value and the supreme criterion. A painful and sorrowful “correction” has been made of the God-Man, of His work and of His teaching [Quoted in Hieromonk Sava Yanjic, “Ecumenism in an Age of Apostasy,” Orthodox America, vol. 18, no. 7-8, 2000, p. 15].

Noting the same things, Protopresbyter Paul Kalinovich adds that European Protestantism, as in general the entire West, has replaced the genuine Christ with a Christ Who gives in to the temptations of Satan. Therefore, he states, the West opposes the genuine Christ.

            And so, standing in opposition to Christ as it does in our time of total secularization, the West is now at the point where it is ready to accept the one-world ruler, the antichrist. Through men who do his will, Satan has laid the groundwork for antichrist's appearance through a gradual, seductive, damaging mutation of Western Christianity into pagan humanism, into pseudo-Christianity.

            In his examination of the phenomena assaulting Christianity in modern times, Hieromonk Seraphim Rose notes that for a growing number of decades now, concurrent with the modern cult of self in the affluent West, Buddhism and Hinduism have made massive inroads into Western culture. This new religious view, coupled with the new “church” being created by the National and World Council of Churches, is leading to a new and universal anti-Christian religion that will be a synthesis of many major religions, although it will particularly mock Christianity. Of that new world religion, Fr. Seraphim explains that “the religion of the future will not be a mere cult or sect, but a powerful and profound religious orientation which will be absolutely convincing to the mind and heart of modern man.”

            Such is a historical overview of how Christianity was transformed in the West, and where that “corrected” and man-made “Christianity” is ultimately leading. As noted earlier, however, this answer will endeavor to explore specifically Protestantism's deviation from the West's former correct understanding of the ecclesiastical interpretation of Scripture — an understanding that prevailed in the West prior to 1054, when the West was still united to Orthodoxy.

            In the scholarly monograph Christianity or the Church? by the Holy New-Martyr Archbishop Ilarion Troitsky (+1929), the translator's preface notes that Protestantism is the daughter of Rome; it was delivered out of her womb in the sixteenth century by various teachers who realized the existence of great errors in Roman Catholicism and were well aware that Rome was only a forgery of the Church of Christ. When they withdrew from Rome, however, they did not seek to find the True Church, although Holy Scriptures assured them that it was still to be found firm and intact on earth. Commenting on this situation, the martyr-archbishop writes:

[Protestantism] did not reestablish ancient Christianity, it only replaced one distortion of Christianity with another, and the new falsehood was much worse than the first. Protestantism became the last word in Papism and brought it to its logical conclusion.... Protestantism [asked]: Why is the truth given to the pope alone? — and added: Truth and salvation are open to each separate individual independently of the Church. Every individual was thus promoted to the rank of infallible pope. Protestantism placed a papal tiara on every German professor and, with its countless popes, completely destroyed the concept of the Church, substituting faith with the reason of each separate personality [p. 28; emphasis added].

In connection with these facts, Hierodeacon Gregory, who, as noted earlier, was formerly a Protestant, comments that both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are united by the same error — that of displacing Christ with a derivative element of the Church. Catholicism, he states, replaces Christ the Victor with the “Vicar of Christ,” whereas Protestantism supplants God the Word with the Word of God (sola Scriptura). Fr. Gregory adds that in both cases, the ultimacy of Christ God is compromised: Roman Catholicism restricts Christianity to one man, while Protestantism dissipates it among all men.

            The striving of the Protestants to restore ecclesiastical truth in the West did not return them to ancient Orthodoxy, but drew them into errors sometimes more grave than those present in the Latin Church. Having enthroned human reason, Protestantism advocated the belief of sola Scriptura (Scripture alone). This is the belief that the meaning of Scripture is clear enough that any believer can understand and interpret it simply by reading it. Thus the Church's help in interpreting Scripture becomes superfluous when every Protestant individual becomes an infallible pope, to use the comparison of the hieromartyr. As Michael Whelton goes on to describe this new doctrine:

Sola Scriptura is like a faulty gene embedded in the genetic code of Protestantism that causes it to perpetually mutate, thus guaranteeing to deny it doctrinal cohesion. It is therefore condemned to do what it has always done-divide, subdivide and divide again [The Pearl, p. 21].

Fr. John Whiteford sets forth a detailed examination of the Protestant approach to Scriptures in his Sola Scriptura: an Orthodox Analysis of the Cornerstone of Reformation Theology, a book that has been widely disseminated in Russia. This scholar's work is of particular merit in that he was formerly a Protestant minister and therefore has firsthand experience with Protestantism's thinking on Scriptures.

            Fr. John, now an Orthodox priest, notes that when the writings of the Holy Fathers are considered at all in Protestantism, when these teachings conflict with the individual Protestant's own private opinions on the Scriptures, those private opinions are considered more authoritative. Thus, instead of listening to the Fathers, whose lives and writings give witness to their sanctity and enlightenment by God, Protestantism gives priority to fallen human reason. The same human reason, however, has led the most influential Lutheran biblical scholars of the past three hundred years not only to reject many essential doctrines of Scripture, but to reject even the divine inspiration of the very foundation upon which the early Lutheran Reformers claimed to base their entire faith. The author also observes that contemporary Protestant scholarship is dominated by modernists who no longer believe in the inspiration or inerrancy of the Scriptures. They now place themselves above the Bible and only choose to use those suit them, discarding the rest as “primitive mythology and legend.” The only authority left for such as these is themselves.

            Fr. John continues, stating that given nothing more than the Bible and the reasoning power of the individual alone, Protestantism could not agree on the meaning of the most basic questions of Christian doctrine. During Martin Luther's lifetime, dozens of differing groups came into existence, each claiming to “just believe in the Bible,” yet each in disagreement with the others as to what the Bible says. As an example, Luther himself stood before the Diet of Worms, stating that unless he could be persuaded by Scripture or by plain reason, he would not retract any of his teachings. Later, however, when the Anabaptists, who were at variance with the Lutherans on a number of points, simply asked for the same indulgence, the Lutherans had them butchered by the thousands. (Although at first Luther opposed the burning of the Anabaptists by Lutherans, he later reluctantly came to approve of the death penalty for them on the grounds that they were guilty of sedition and blasphemy).

            What a trend Luther started by completely ignoring fifteen centuries of the Church's existence and refusing to return to it, only to invent his own Church instead! As Archpriest George Larin notes, since Luther's time, there have been no end to “reformers” of “Christianity,” each and all claiming to have rediscovered “lost biblical truth.” This is truly a sad state of affairs! The only thing that all of these so-called “reformers of the Church” have in common is that each group claims to rightly understand the Bible, and all of them have a particular blindness to what is written in the Bible — itself a product of the Orthodox Church that they reject.

            Frank Schaeffer, a convert from Protestantism and the son of a noted Protestant theologian, explains that Protestants believe that they need no interpretation but their own in deciphering the meaning of Scriptures. No bishop, Apostolic or otherwise, has any authority over them regarding its true meaning, nor does any Father of the Church or Council hold any special wisdom to which they should hearken. For Protestants, their religion is a matter of personal choice. It is, in fact, anything they want it to be, although they might not admit as much. They proclaim that what they believe is biblical, although the Bible says anything they want it to say. They tend to reject the ancient Christian idea that the Holy Spirit leads the Church, yet they readily claim that the Spirit leads them personally, for which reason they are correct about theological matters and are “doing the Lord's will” in personal matters. If they disagree with the teaching of one denomination or minister, they shop around until they find one whose doctrine and personality suits them. Mr. Schaeffer points out that intuitive feelings and subjective interpretations of Scripture came to replace the Apostolic Holy Tradition as the guiding principle for biblical understanding. In the West, the subjective expression “I believe” came to replace the ancient declaration of faith: “This is what the Church has always taught.”

            Fr. John Whiteford comments further on Protestantism's subjective approach. He explains that with a subjectivity that surpasses that of the most speculative Freudian psychoanalysts, Protestant scholars subjectively choose the “facts” and “evidence” that suits their agenda and then proceed, with their conclusions essentially predetermined by their basic assumptions, to apply their methods to the Holy Scriptures — all the while thinking themselves to be dispassionate scientists. Moreover, he notes, since modern universities do not give out PhDs to those who merely pass on the unadulterated truth, these scholars seek to outdo each other by coming up with new “creative” theories. In this entire approach, the former Protestant minister writes, is the very essence of heresy: novelty, arrogant personal opinion, and self-deception.

            Today the differing confessions within Western Christianity number 23,000, and new groups spring up almost daily. Each and every one of them — whether Roman Catholic or Protestant — has created its own “truths” and doctrines, and each has either added to or taken away from the teachings of the Holy Apostles, and has altered the meaning of the Holy Gospels.

            The same Fr. John notes that one common approach among the Protestants today (one that is most common among the less educated fundamentalists, evangelicals and charismatics) is “just take the Bible literally; its meaning is clear.” These groups also often say: “The Bible says what it means and means what it says.” However, when these groups come to scriptural texts that Protestants generally disagree with — for example, Christ's giving the Apostles the power to forgive sins (Jn 20:23), or Christ's saying of the Holy Eucharist: “This is My body.... This is My blood” (Mt 26:26,28), or the Apostle Paul's teaching that women should cover their heads in church, then all of a sudden the Bible no longer means what it says! With fallen human reason, Protestants arbitrarily decide that these verses are not meant to be taken literally. In this way individual Protestants arrogate to themselves the power of being infallible popes (as St. Ilarion correctly noted of them), who in utter delusion imagine themselves to have a superior understanding of truth than the Holy Apostles, the Holy Fathers, and the Truth of truths, the Truth Himself, the Incarnate God. This pick-and-choose-what-to-believe approach has become the standard Western approach.

            Seeing that so many splinter groups could not agree on the interpretation of Scripture, Fr. John adds, Protestant scholars asserted that the Holy Spirit would guide pious individuals to interpret Scriptures correctly. However, everyone who disagreed in matters of doctrine could not possibly be guided by the same Spirit. Thus, each of the differing groups within Protestantism started to de-Christianize those others who disagreed with it. If such an idea were valid, it would produce one group of Protestants who had rightly interpreted the Scriptures, yet which of all the myriad denominations could it possibly be?

            As the answer depended upon an individual's particular affiliation, Fr. John states, it became increasingly popular for Protestants to conclude that differences do not matter so much, that perhaps each group has a piece of the truth, while no one group has the whole truth. The idea that all denominations, even entire religions, must be equally respected, gave way to the belief that all religions are equally true, even when they contradict one another.

            The utter illogicality and falsehood of this conclusion beggar the imagination. However, this assertion was taken over by the Protestant-dominated ecumenical movement as its battle cry.

            Concerning the development of the ecumenical movement, the translators of the Holy New-Martyr Archbishop Ilarion's Christianity of the Church? explain in the introduction that:

It was [at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution] when the weak and divided Protestant denominations, who previously had attacked the Church of Christ with their false teachings only as isolated viruses, had begun to unite together into what later became the World Council of Churches in order to attack the Holy Church in a “united front.” The bride of the antichrist was creating herself and “the beginning of the illness” was about to erupt [p. 6].

And erupt it did! The ecumenical movement created the pan heresy of ecumenism. This false teaching maintains — and modern man has been programmed to believe — that “all truth is relative,” that there is no such thing as objective and absolute truth (which means that there is no truth at all), that anything and everything must be accepted, no matter how outlandish, perverse or factually untrue. As the writer Peter Jackson notes, in pluralistic Western culture, no opinion is permitted to lay claim to absolute Truth. Hence, any opinion is considered valid just as long as it makes no claim to be anything more than a mere opinion. Any view is tolerated except the one which says, “This is the Truth.”

            These ideas find fertile ground in the modern age of extreme atheistic relativism with its popular attitudes that reflect sensitivity to “multicultural diversity” and “politically correct language.” In such an environment, the only dogma tolerated is that we should be intolerant of those who actually believe that there are dogmas reflecting absolute truth.

            In the ecumenical movement, a new basis of understanding of the Church and faith is given, one that echoes the spirit of the times, but not the eternal Word of God. Many of the movements Protestant leaders reject basic Gospel principles and hesitate to accept Christ's Divinity, the Resurrection and immortality. Moreover, the agents of ecumenism grant its regulatory control to the clear enemies of Christianity and to secret societies opposed to Christianity (1 Jn 2:19).

            The ecumenical movement proclaims that the Orthodox Church is not the Church of Christ, that there is no visible Church of Christ, and that it is only now being formed. Ecumenism also applies to the notion of the “True Church” such epithets as “medievalism,” narrow-mindedness, fanaticism, ignorance and darkness, yet at this time, it is beginning to honor itself as the one true “church.”

            The ecumenical movement also preaches a pluralism that maintains that the grace of God is present in all the Western denominations, that the details of one's belief in Christ are of no moment, and that one's membership in any particular Church is also of no importance. And, ecumenism adds, there is grace in the non-Christian      religions as well, for all religions come from the same source, share common beliefs, and thus are the same, are one.

            The ecumenical movement is creating a synthesis of religions that will comprise of all “partial” views (e.g., freemasonry, Hegelianism, Unitarianism, Bahai, Buddhism, and all world religions), although it is completely hostile to Orthodox Christianity, alone among all the religions. With such a hodgepodge of innovations and syncretism, ecumenism drowns out all other voices with its proclamations of Christian unity, unity of all religions, branch theories, unconditional love, love with no bounds, sharing, salvation, dialogues, interfaith prayers, ecumenical services, and the like.

            This infinitely sinister movement, ecumenism, is financially backed by those forces bringing about the new world order, the one-world government of the antichrist. Acting at the behest of political leaders, ecumenism seeks to unite all religions into one in order to attack and destroy Christ's Orthodox Church once and for all — that is, to finish off doing what Communism was created in the apostate West to do, but could not do. Indeed, the same ecumenical movement colluded with the same forerunner government of the antichrist — Communism — in its attempt to destroy Orthodox Christianity.

*   *   *   *   *

Fr. John notes that there is not one single verse in the entirety of Holy Scriptures that teaches the Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura, or even comes close to teaching it. While numerous passages in the Bible speak of its inspiration, of its authority and its profitability, still, there is no place in the Scriptures that teaches that Scriptures alone are authoritative for believers. If such a teaching were even implicit, then the Holy Fathers would most assuredly have taught that doctrine. However, none of them ever taught any such thing. Thus, Fr. John observes, Protestantism's most basic teaching is contrary to itself and self-destructs. Not only is sola Scriptura not taught in the Bible, but it is specifically contradicted by the Bible, which teaches that Holy Tradition is binding to Christians (2 Thes 2:15, 1 Cor 11:2).

            Fr. John therefore came to understand that in the Orthodox approach to Scriptures, it is not for an individual to strive for originality in interpretation, but rather to understand what is already present in the Tradition of the Church. Thus, one is not to go beyond the boundaries set by the Holy Fathers and the Creeds of the Church, but is to faithfully pass on Tradition as we have received it. To do such, one need not only apply oneself to great study and thought, but one must enter deeply into the mystical life of the Church.

            Fr. John mentions that a millennium and a half ago, a pre-Schism Father of the West, Blessed Augustine of Hippo, expounded on how one should study Holy Scriptures. This Father placed emphasis not on human reason or on the intellectual knowledge that one should possess, but on what kind of person one should be. He wrote that:

·        One must love God with one's whole heart and must be empty of pride.

·        One must be motivated to seek the knowledge of God's will by faith and reverence rather than by pride or greed.

·        One must have a heart subdued by piety, a purified mind, and must be dead to the world. One must neither fear men nor seek to please men.

·        One must seek nothing but knowledge of Christ and union with Him.

·         One must hunger and thirst after righteousness.

·        Finally, one must be diligently engaged in works of mercy and love.

With such a standard, Fr. John states, one should all the more humbly turn to the guidance of the Holy Fathers who had these virtues and who were raised up by God as brilliant illuminators who interpreted the mysteries contained in Holy Scriptures. One must not delude oneself into thinking that one is a more capable or clever interpreter of Scriptures than the Fathers.

            Once Protestants come to understand the fallacies inherent in the Protestant approach to Scriptures, it is only a short step for them to return to the Church that their Western forebears belonged to prior to 1054, to “come home” to Orthodox Christianity, even as the former Protestant minister and scholar Fr. John did. Having come home, this Orthodox priest can now offer the following insight:

If Protestants should think the [Orthodox understanding is] arrogant or naive, let them first consider the arrogance and naiveté of those scholars who think they are qualified to override (or more often, totally ignore) two thousand years of Christian teaching. Does the acquisition of a PhD give one greater insight into the mysteries of God than the common wisdom of millions upon millions of faithful believers and the Fathers and Mothers of the Church who faithfully served God and men, who endured terrible tortures and martyrdoms, mockings and imprisonments for the faith? Is Christianity learned only in the comfort of one's study, or also as one carries his cross to be killed on it?

The arrogance lies with those who, without even taking the time to learn what Holy Tradition is, decide they know better — that only now has someone come along who has rightly understood what the Scriptures really mean.

The Holy Scriptures are the summit of the Tradition of the Church. But the greatness of the heights to which the Scriptures ascend is due to the great mountain upon which [they rest]. Taken from its context within Holy Tradition, the solid rock of Scripture becomes a mere ball of clay, to be molded into whatever shape its handlers wish. It is no honor to the Scriptures to misuse or twist them, even if this is done in the name of exalting their authority.

We must read the Bible; it is God's Holy Word! But to understand its message, let us humbly sit at the feet of the saints who have shown themselves “doers of the Word and not hearers only” (James 1:22), and have been proven by their lives worthy interpreters of the Scriptures. Let us go to those who knew the Apostles, such as Saints Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp, if we have a question about the writings of the Apostles. Let us inquire of the Church, and not fall into self-deluded arrogance. [Sola Scriptura: an Orthodox Analysis of the Cornerstone of Reformation Theology, pp. 44-45; emphasis added].

Fr. John's remarkable passage needs no exegesis. It speaks for itself.

            In the same vein did Luke Gehring, another convert to Orthodoxy, respond to the Jehovah's Witnesses who rang his doorbell. He stated:

The Bible was written by Orthodox Christians for Orthodox Christians, preserved in times of persecution even at the expense of their own lives. And for you to now pick up the book which we have given to you, and claim that we are in error in understanding it, and that you have the true interpretation, is highly presumptuous in my opinion.... There is a succession of Orthodox bishops back to the original Apostles. Because you are outside that lineage, outside the culture, you have only your speculations as to the meaning of Scriptures. You do not have any true understanding, because you are not a part of Christ's Body. Or, to use another metaphor, you must be grafted to the true vine. Without this, you cannot understand the Bible rightly.... Being outside the historic Church-Orthodoxy, you are left to your own speculations, in place of the ancient understanding of Scripture [False Witness: a Dialogue with the Jehovah's Witnesses, pp. 3-5; emphasis added].